https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-gave-in-to-radicals-and-gave-up-on-common-sense-11581444825?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
George Orwell noted the nervousness of people on the left when confronted by those even further to the left. This nervousness stems from leftists’ fear that they will be taken for impure in their own leftism, that their thought and actions don’t go far enough, that they are, finally, not really on the bus. In America during the 1930s, Communists mocked liberals for their weakness, and liberals worried about not measuring up. Hence the phenomenon of the “fellow traveler,” someone who sympathized with the Communist Party but couldn’t bring himself to join it.
Orwell’s observation remains in play. In the mid-1960s, Stokely Carmichael and other young black militants pushed the American civil-rights movement leftward, and away from its goal of integration. Liberals, unable to face down this left-wing pull toward Black Power, knuckled under. A gloriously successful campaign for equal rights based on conscience and dignity devolved into an angry, incoherent movement based on guilt and victimhood. The last thing allowed was the concession of progress of any sort in racial matters. Impressive civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph were replaced by such dubious figures as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The movement never recovered.
The same phenomenon appeared in American universities. In faculty meetings everywhere, small groups of the most radical professors were able to get their way through political pressure. Liberals, generally in the majority, were worried (if not terrified) of seeming to be on the wrong side. When they didn’t give in completely, they sought compromises that invariably favored the radicals. Standards and intellectual authority in universities have given way to political correctness and identity politics.
